How do other people manage to set up their personal websites? It is easy enough with WordPress to get a basic site up and running. But it has taken me days and days to work out how to get social media buttons onto the sidebar of this one. I fly about between screens, chasing URLs and passwords and old memos in the deep caverns of my computer and among the loose notes and notebooks on my desk. The worst of it is that I cannot reward myself with a glass of wine at six o’clock. I’m trying to lower blood pressure through diet rather than medication, so no alcohol for a while.
All these tussles and puzzles need to be gone through in order to regain my mojo for writing. I want to find new readers for the kind of fiction I like to write. In the past when I was lucky enough to be published by mainstream publishers, I received lots of good reviews. I can see no reason why there aren’t a number of readers out there who would enjoy my last three novels. But how can we find each other?
I’ve given up on getting any response from agents or publishers, and am now swimming in the crowded ocean of self-publishers, most of whom – or so it seems to me – write fantasy fiction of one sort or another, with an anything-goes kind of attitude to writing standards.
If anyone who happens to read this and is in the same situation as I am – a writer of literary fiction who has been published in the past by mainstream publishers – do please get in touch.
Uncategorized
A constant experiment
When we lived in Papingo, one of the Zagori villages in north-western Greece, I worked on an Amstrad. Before that, I had something called a Screentyper which was the very latest in electric typewriters. It had a rudimentary wordprocessing system. How many years ago now? Our Greek book Travels with a Wildlife Artist, the Living Landscape of Greece was published in 1986. So I’ve been using wordprocessing software of one sort or another for thirty three years. Anyone would think I was adept by now. I’ve always learnt by trial and error, and there have always been many errors on the way to the knowing how to do something. As the systems change constantly, I feel I’m constantly back at the beginning. With WordPress, I’ve been playing around with different themes, and I’ve still not learnt how to get the social media icons onto my sidebar. My thought today that, like software, life itself is in constant need of the Update button.
The lone monk of Toso Nero, Sifnos, 1963
We’ve been looking through the photographs Peter took in the early 60s when we were living in Greece. They record a way of life that we witnessed which has long since disappeared. We are thinking of making a record in words and pictures of those times.
New Post May 4th 2017 – Spring cleaning
Nesting
I’ve been spring-cleaning this website. My head’s whirling. Time for a rest.
A dreadful language?
How does anyone ever learn English? I came across this poem in a magazine in the local surgery’s waiting room. If I’d written it, I wouldn’t choose to be anonymous. The poem-writer is, or was, very clever. Does anyone know its history?
The English Language
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! An now you wish, perhaps,
To learnof less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it’s said like bed, bot bead.
For goodness sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s does and rose and lose –Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cast –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I mastered it when I was five. ANON
Spam
I’m horrified to see that there’s a hole in my website that’s letting in spam and seeping it through to Facebook, and probably other social media sites. I’ll spend this morning trying to plug the leakage. Back to LiveChat as per the cartoon?
Live Chat …
Hours and hours
I’ve moaned about this before; that is, spending time on social media. Engagement involves more than writing posts, commenting and replying to others. Hours and hours can be spent on polishing up your online presence. The other day I got into one of those tangles that involve clicking on the Help button. Most of us will have experienced that long wait for a response. Messages come up thanking us for our patience. They can’t see the demented person reading that message, displaying all signs of a total lack of patience. It led me to while away the time drawing the scene.
How did I do?
There may be people who never feel the need for feedback. Perhaps even Trappist monks occasionally feel let down when they spend the day in prayer and no-one says at the end “Well done.” If you cook a meal, and I don’t mean just heat up a readymade, you’re encouraged to repeat the performance if it’s greeted with appreciation. Even as the daily cook in our household of two, I know I like to hear some kind of response, even if it’s just the question, “Is there any more?”
Yesterday, 26th April, I received the consultant’s report after a CT colonoscopy on March 31st. During the wait, I’d felt reasonably confident the result would be clear. Yet it is all too easy to fill silences with imaginary bad news. So I was relieved to learn that the scan showed up nothing untoward. Better than this was the consultant’s style. His letter read like a kindly schoolteacher’s summing up of the term’s work: “the bowel was well prepared” … “this is a reassuring investigation”. It made me feel like a praised pupil and led me to think about feedback, how useful it can be, not just for morale but for guidance.
This morning I played around with something that turned up in the (possibly) haphazard way that happens when we log onto our emails. Google suggested I create a form. So I’ve come up with a feedback form for “White Lies”. Whether this will be useful or not remains to be seen. I’ve had good reviews posted on the novel’s Amazon page but many readers don’t bother. Others are given the book or borrow it, so they are not ‘verified purchasers’ and therefore not entitled to post a review.
The form may be a way of capturing the response of more readers. Or I might ditch that form and compose another one for all my novels. Here’s the link: https://goo.gl/forms/IJoDTVzRVZJdNKwm1. If anyone has a view on the questions I’ve chosen to put on the form, I’d appreciated feedback.
At the same time I became involved in a LinkedIn book group discussion. Someone asked how he could get reviews for the short story he’d just published on Amazon. His request was not worded well. He wrote, “We’re there any funny parts.” I found myself eager to point out how the apostrophe altered his intended meaning. Later, I worried that I’d been harsh on a newcomer. I hope he can accept what I consider was constructive feedback.
A kind of Aladdin’s lamp
Much-travelled lamp, now hanging in the summerhouse
I put this photo of our oil lamp on Facebook with a description of its travels from the flea market, Monistiraki, in Athens to our home on Amorgos in the Cyclades in 1967. As I wrote, the story gathered names and places until the story and the lamp ended up in our present-day summerhouse. One day I may write the story of our married life, using the lamp’s travels as the framework.